Saudi crown prince pushes for liberalization of his society

Everyone with an interest in the Middle East will welcome this study by Karen Elliott House of a man who is bound to play a vital role in the region’s future. 

Between the moment Karen Elliott House finished the text of her book The Man Who Would Be King and its forthcoming publication on July 8, events of historic proportions have taken place.

In the month before the book’s appearance, the long-established order of the Middle East was stood on its head. It was US President Donald Trump’s declared intention, during his second presidential campaign and shortly after assuming office, to withdraw the United States from foreign entanglements. However, on June 22, he dispatched a fleet of stealth bombers into Iran and destroyed its three major nuclear facilities.

What happened has changed the geopolitical aspect of the Middle East. It does not, however, detract at all from House’s in-depth, insightful, and fascinating account of the life, achievements, and future plans of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and virtual leader, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).

A look at the crown prince of Saudi Arabia

In 2019, House reminds her readers, Iran bombed Saudi oil fields; and Trump, in his first term as president, though closely aligned with the kingdom, did nothing in retaliation.

Saudi leaders took that, she writes, “as evidence that Washington is no longer a reliable protector of the kingdom…The US ignoring a direct attack by Iran on the kingdom was… shocking.” Which explains why House writes, elsewhere in the volume: “The kingdom’s traditional protector, the United States, is steadily losing interest and influence in the region.”

That view surely needs modifying in light of recent events.

In compiling this work, House has drawn on decades of personal involvement with Saudi Arabia and its leading personalities – and MBS in particular.

That she likes him and admires his achievement in turning his country from a strict, repressive, Islamic theocracy into a modern, secular-oriented (though still Islam-rooted) nation is evident. That, however, has not deterred her from presenting her readers with other, less attractive, aspects of his personality.

She details, for example, how he ruthlessly eliminated the internal opposition to his rise to power, including what has become known as the Ritz-Carlton lockup when he rounded up members of the royal family and kept them under armed guard – albeit in a luxury hotel – until they agreed to relinquish their challenge to his authority. What he threatened them with has never been revealed.

“MBS achieved at least two goals with the Ritz lockup,” writes House.

“He disgraced and disposed of the late King Abdullah’s sons as potential challengers to his power. One paid the government a reported $1 billion of alleged ill-gotten money and was forced to resign his powerful post as head of the national guard, giving MBS control of all the kingdom’s armed forces. Another of King Abdullah’s sons remains in prison to this day. But the Ritz-Carlton lockup was much more than a family affair. It was a terrifying signal to elite Saudis that the way of doing business in the kingdom was changing.”

House provides a vivid contrast of life in the kingdom today compared with how it was when MBS was growing up.

Yet against his extensive liberalization of Saudi society in general, and in particular that of women within that society, the horrific murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi still casts a shadow.

House was acquainted with Khashoggi, whom she had interviewed many times. He had started by supporting the young MBS on his rise to power but later became increasingly critical about the prince’s elimination of all opposition, when – as House puts it: “No longer were powerful uncles alive to curb MBS, as they had with previous kings’ empowered sons.”

Khashoggi left Saudi Arabia for the US, where his articles in The Washington Post grew ever more critical of MBS and, House writes, “led to his shocking death in October 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Khashoggi’s body was sawn into pieces and hauled out in suitcases. That brutal murder was sensational news worldwide. Overnight, MBS, the Saudi savior, was now widely viewed as a savage. Suddenly, MBS stood for ‘Mr. Bone Saw’ to his critics.”

HOUSE IS convinced, and presents a very convincing case, that MBS never ordered Khashoggi’s assassination, that his murder was in fact an abduction attempt that went wrong. All the (circumstantial) evidence points to an operation aimed at seizing Khashoggi and flying him back to Saudi Arabia. What MBS actually planned to do with him, once he had been returned, is anyone’s guess.

Born in 1947, Karen Elliott House is an American journalist and former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Her journalism awards include a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in regard to coverage of the Middle East.

Her book On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines – and Future was published in 2012.

The meticulous research that went into The Man Who Would Be King is obvious from the 21 pages of detailed notes that she appends to it. Every major statement the author makes is provided with its source and can be checked by the assiduous reader. In addition, 13 pages of references help her readers access each facet of her investigation into MBS’s life, career, and plans.

For many in Israel who are interested in Saudi Arabia and its dynamic young leader, the most intriguing aspect of recent years has been the speculation about whether the kingdom could be the next Arab state to normalize relations with the Jewish state and join the Abraham Accords. House, of course, deals in detail with the history of Saudi-Israel relations, and she asserts that MBS’s vision is “for his kingdom’s economic and security future tied to cooperation with Israel.”

In view of that, it is rather odd that the term “Abraham Accords” never appears in the book and is therefore absent from the index.

House describes how MBS’s vision of Saudi-Israeli cooperation was blown off course by Hamas’s massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and even more so by the death and destruction within Gaza following Israel’s efforts to defeat Hamas.

She writes: “Saudi officials say the Crown Prince would be putting his life at risk were he to recognize Israel when his own young population and that of other Arab states is deeply incensed by images on social media of Israeli devastation and death in Gaza.”

The ceasefire in the 12-day Israel-Iran war is another recent event that could put a different gloss on previous attitudes and opinions.

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia is less than 100 years old. It was only in 1932 that Abdul Aziz ibn Saud emerged from many years of political and military struggle against the Ottoman Empire and other local chieftains and was able to name the area he had conquered “Saudi Arabia” and proclaim himself its monarch.

It was doubtless with an eye to the eventual centenary celebrations of the monarchy and the kingdom that in April 2016, MBS launched Saudi Vision 2030, an ambitious plan to revitalize the nation state.

If it succeeds, by 2032 Saudi Arabia will have been transformed from virtual total dependence on oil revenues into a modern, liberalized, thriving society, its prosperity underpinned by flourishing industrial, financial, economic, and commercial sectors.

House, telling us of MBS’s long fascination with futuristic video games, sees his Vision 2030 as “full of his grandiose, videogame futurisms. At the top of a long list,” she writes, “is Neom, a $500 billion development nearly the size of Belgium… It will feature an AI-driven linear city, “the Line,” a high-rise mirrored structure running 110 miles long and standing 1,600 feet high – taller than the Empire State Building. The city will have no cars and no carbon emissions, [ and be] powered entirely by renewable energy. Residents will travel by high-speed trains and flying taxis.”

However, there have been setbacks along the way, and some of the more ambitious schemes in Vision 2030, including Neom, have had to be cut back.

House reserves judgment: “Whether the kingdom successfully transitions from Vision 2030’s big push to a sustained long push by truly diversifying sources of public revenue across oil, mining, sales tax, tourism, and financial income on both domestic and foreign assets remains to be seen.”

The Man Who Would Be King is a highly readable assessment by an expert – who is also a top-flight journalist – of one of the most colorful and characterful personalities on today’s political scene. She presents him “warts and all,” as Oliver Cromwell is reputed to have remarked – and her account is all the more entertaining because of it.

MBS is still a young man – he celebrates his 40th birthday on August 31. His story is far from over. Everyone with an interest in the Middle East will welcome this study by Karen Elliott House of a man who is bound to play a vital role in the region’s future. 

The writer is the Middle East correspondent for Eurasia Review. His latest book is Trump and the Holy Land: 2016-2020. Follow him at www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com.

• THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING: MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF SAUDI ARABIA